Hmp

[avevale_intelligencer]

stakebait linked to this, which (like most science journalism) I suspect is not nearly as exciting as the headline makes it sound. I also have some doubt about its veracity; apparently:

"...the detection of the qubit in the future must be symmetric in time with its creation in the past. "If the past detector was active at a quarter to 12:00, then the future detector must wait to become active at precisely a quarter past 12:00 in order to achieve entanglement."

I'm as interested in time travel as the next fan, but I can't help wondering (unlike any of the commenters, at least at the time of writing) what an arbitrary division of time based on the rotation of our particular planet and a more or less random point on its surface has to do with anything. But then, since I don't know what a "qubit" is, maybe that's a silly question. Maybe you have to know if a particular particle is running on GMT before you use it. Or maybe this whole thing is a little scientific joke. I don't know.

In another collection of links, browngirl linked to this, which is a very persuasive article whose thesis is that the Tea Party's main problem with American government for the last eighty years is that it mitigates the effect of karma; in other words, that it supports and helps people who are in trouble as a result of their own mistakes. They feel (it says), being basically conservative and libertarian, that everyone should stand or fall by their own efforts, and if they fall they should fall hard because that's the way the world is. Thus they're as unhappy with Bush's bailout of the banks as they were with Roosevelt's New Deal.

I don't need to tell anyone here that I disagree utterly with this. I've been supported and helped too many times when I was in trouble as a result of my own mistakes to have any claim on that particular patch of moral high ground, and the people who helped me seem to have thought it was a good idea at the time. I certainly did, and do. We are here to help each other, not to judge each other; that's my feeling, and it's a fairly strong one. (Which is not to say that I approve of Bush's bailout of the banks, but that likewise should be clear from previous posts.)

But quite apart from that, while there may be some in the Tea Party who feel that way, I find it hard to believe that everyone in that camp is acting from such--noble?--motives. I could be wrong, though. Frequently am.

There's a lot more, but I have work to do. I hope everyone's having a good Friday (not a Good Friday, though, that's not for a while yet).

Comments

[melodyclark.livejournal.com]

Much of the Tea Party is astro turf -- fake grass roots -- paid for by the same league of sociopathic rich people who've run the GOP since Reagan. The GOP has none of its own grass roots so it's trying to have its grass cake and eat it too. lol They're also trying their own crappy road show take on the Obama/Hillary show from 2008 -- in other words, trying to dominate the news by two factions of one party -- but are failing miserably.

The minute Rand Paul (the idiot omnipodaddy of this tribe) admits he wants to do away with Social Security, the Tea Party will be over.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

The bit missing from the qubit detection story is something along the lines of "Suppose the pair-creation event takes place at noon:"

[armb.livejournal.com]

To be fair to the science journalists, that bit isn't just missing from the story, it's missing from the abstract of the paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.2565

[sodzilla.livejournal.com]

...I was about to say that article makes no bloody sense, but then I realized that from the point of view of someone who believes with all their heart (or wants to believe, or wants to pretend they believe) in an EVENTUAL reward for all the shit we go through here on earth, and who believes that reward will be awesome enough to make up for the fact there's little justice or kindness here - and will be even less if their ideology prevails! - it makes perfect sense.

So I won't say they're talking through their asses. I WILL say their belief is not mine, and will never be mine. And that the list, in that article, of "bad actions" that should be punished either in this world or by God after death is creepy, disgusting, fucked up, and I could go on but you get the idea.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Time Teleport story: Revised link that actually works for me (dunno about anyone else): http://uk.gizmodo.com/5736217/scientist-discovers-time-teleportation

(The one you've got just takes me to their general round-up page.)

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

...and the abstract they link to tells us bugger all. But my assumption, based on the wording of the abstract, is that when they say "discovered", they mean "discovered to be an implication of the theory", as opposed to "discovered to actually happen in reality". They describe in outline a hypothetical experiment in which, according to the theory, we *should* see temporal teleportation of the qubit.

N.B. A qubit is a "quantum bit", i.e. a single bit of information that's been encoded into one element of the quantum mechanical state of a particle (such as, for example, which way round an electron is spinning). Entanglement is the situation where one of these pieces of state information - one qubit - is "miraculously" preserved or mirrored between two particles that have been made to match up with/mirror each other before they were separated, despite neither of them having had a definite fixed value for that qubit until one of them was examined. By forcing one particle to make up its mind and seeing what value it "chooses", you therefore know what value the other particle now has. The decision, as it were, instantly teleports from the examined particle across to the (as yet) unexamined one.

What the abstract seems to be saying is that, in the case where two entangled particles originate at a given moment of time (dubbed "12:00") and head in opposite temporal directions, then it should be possible for equidistant past and future detectors to detect the entanglement, in exactly the same way that two detectors equidistant form the source in space should detect it for the more obvious case of the two particles both heading forwards in time.

The big question of course is whether we actually have any good evidence that entangled particles *can* go opposite directions in time, and I think the real point of this hypothetical experiment is that, if we can do it for real, then it would be a pretty good test of whether they can (because it works) or can't (because it doesn't).

Things I would want to know more about (for which I'd need to get access to the paper and take at least week off to try getting my head around it): When they talk about the detector being "in the same spatial location" in the past and future of the entangling event, what exactly do they mean, i.e. with respect to what frame of reference? Does the theoretical model they're working with adequately incorporate relativity, at least enough to put limits on how far "the same spatial location" might drift with respect to a real, earthbound lab's frame of reference? Etc.

[howeird]

We are here to help each other, not to judge each other
Ah, but we help those whom we judge to be worthy of help. For many values of "worthy".

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

Someone today said it had been a good Friday, and I misunderstood him to mean it had been a Good Friday.

After it got cleared up, I said "I'm Jewish! I don't keep track of these things."

He said, "that's OK. I won't hold it against you."

. . . I'm not sure what to make of that statement.